Quickie bonus recipe: Cranberry pears

Yesterday morning, Brian and I went out to visit some of the local stores we like to hit whenever we're in Indianapolis. When we returned around lunchtime, his folks weren't home, but his mom had left us a sticky note on the kitchen table reading, "Eat pears!" Apparently she'd bought a bunch of them, and she was concerned that they wouldn't remain in eatable condition much longer.

The easiest way to obey this instruction, of course, would have been simply to take a pear, cut it up, and eat it. I'd had one of them already, and I knew it would taste fine by itself. But as it happened, she had made baked apples for dessert just a couple of nights before, and I'd mused about how this dish would work with pears instead of apples. And the previous night, we'd had a sort of pasta-spinach salad for dinner, accompanied by cranberry sauce, and there was still some of it left over in the fridge.

So, putting those two facts together in my mind, I decided to try experimenting a bit. I cut one of the pears in half, cored it, spooned cranberry sauce into the middle, and microwaved it for one minute on high. I realized this wouldn't really be the same thing as baking it in a slow oven that would give the flavors of the filling time to soak into the pear-flesh, but I figured it would be good enough for a proof of concept.

As you can see, this dish is a little difficult to eat neatly, but it tasted pretty good. A minute in the microwave was enough to heat the pear through and soften it up to the point that it could easily be eaten with a spoon, peel and all. And as I suspected, the flavors of the pear and the cranberry sauce complemented each other pretty well. They'd probably be still better if the pears were cooked slowly with the cranberries, so the flavors could combine more thoroughly. (In fact, it looks like Martha Stewart had much the same idea.) But for a dish I came up with on the spur of the minute using leftovers, it was a striking success. I think there's still some cranberry sauce left in the fridge, so maybe I'll take the opportunity to tinker with it a little more and see if I can improve on it any while still keeping the preparation fairly simple.

Gardeners' Holidays: The Changing of the Garden

The wheel of the year has turned round once again, and we find ourselves at the end of the gardening season. Everything left in the garden has been harvested: the last few green tomatoes left on the vines, all the squash, the lima beans. All that's out there now is the Winter Marvel lettuce, which we hope will survive under the winter snow and give us a second crop in the spring.

So, with all the harvest gathered in, it's time to evaluate this year's crops and see just how they did. And I have to say, it's a pretty mixed bag. A few crops produced amazing yields, while others—including some that have been fantastic in the past—were disappointing.

• Arugula: Meh. We planted four squares of it, and we harvested maybe one bunch from each square. I thought this was a disappointing performance from a crop that used to be one of our most prolific producers, but Brian says there was "lots of it" in the bed; we just didn't get a "second bump" out of it like we sometimes do. It all got picked fairly early on, and then it was gone. So maybe we just need to stagger the plantings of it a bit more so we can spread out the harvest.
• Asparagus: Even more meh. Most of the new crowns we planted this spring in the secondary bed (just outside the garden fence, next to the rhubarb) didn't even come up, and the old bed produced maybe one pound total. Next year, we're going to make a point of buying some new crowns while they're fresh, not the last pickings left at the Co-Op, and plant them in both the new bed and the old one on the south side of the house.
• Basil: We planted something like seven squares of sweet basil and harvested only a couple of good-sized bunches. For a crop that produced so much in 2013 that we had to come up with new ways to store it all, this was a definite disappointment. This was the same variety we've always used, so maybe it was just this year's weather that resulted in the poor harvest, but on the other hand, if this year's weather is the new normal, maybe a new variety would do better overall. I figure we'll give it one more year to see how it works out. On the plus side, the Thai basil we tried for the first time this year produced reasonably well and proved very useful, so we'll definitely expand the planting of that next year.
• Cilantro: Virtually useless. We planted one square and got almost nothing out of it. At this point, it's probably not worth even planting it again, since it hasn't done well for the last several years; as Brian puts it, "If it shows up at all, it shows up and dies fast." And I don't even like it that much, so it's no loss to me.
• Cucumbers: Pretty good—about 36 cucumbers off 8 vines, evenly split between the Marketmore and Cross-Country varieties. However, a couple of the Marketmores came out bitter, so we might go with all or mostly Cross-Country next year.
• Dill: Nothing extraordinary, but we got enough to keep us in dill pickles. So there's no need either to increase or decrease our planting next year. 
• Green Beans: This was one of those pleasant surprises. Not only did our old standby, Provider, give us about six pounds of beans, but after it had stopped producing, we got another two pounds and change off a mystery bean plant that somehow got in among the Provider seeds. We've tentatively identified this variety as a Climbing French bean, so we're going to try picking up a packet of those (Fedco doesn't carry them, so it may mean placing a secondary seed order somewhere else) and planting them wherever we can find room. This year, they ended up taking over the trellis just vacated by the snap peas, so maybe we should try to work it the same way next year.
• Leeks: Pathetic. We were a bit late getting them into the ground (around mid-April) and we harvested only four tiny leeks from two squares planted. We'll try to get them in a little earlier next year, and if the crop is equally disappointing, I think it's time to ditch them altogether.
• Lettuce: Not too bad. Our new Bronze Mignonette variety, which replaced the Tom Thumb Bibb lettuce, gave us six good heads from three squares, and our Summer Lettuce Mix another four bunches or so. The Winter Marvel lettuce has only just started to come up, but we're hoping to get some in early spring, and maybe even during the winter. So we'll probably stick with these varieties for now.
• Lima Beans: We only got about ten ounces altogether, once they were shelled and dried. That's not much of a harvest for eight plants, but then, they're not really taking up much space either, since we only planted them on the three trellis squares behind one of the zucchini plants. So we may as well keep going with them, at least until we use up this year's seeds.
• Marigolds: Not for eating, obviously, but we got nice cutting flowers off them all summer long. I honestly can't tell if they help keep pests off the tomatoes or not, but I'm willing to keep them just for decoration.
• Parsley: The seeds we planted never came up, so we ended up buying some from the Rutgers plant sale. But Brian planted one of them in the herb bed in the front yard (mainly so he could say it contained parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme), and it's still looking green and healthy, even though it's technically an annual. So if it survives the winter, we may as well just leave it there and not bother planting any in the garden itself.
• Peppers: Mixed results. Our Carmen frying peppers, which were such promising newcomers last year, hit the ball out of the park this year, producing 33 big, flavorful peppers from just one plant. Our old Jimmy Nardello frying pepper turned in a satisfactory performance with 12 peppers, but it paled by comparison with the Carmen. And our other two varieties were a complete bust: the Klari Baby Cheese pickling peppers gave us only seven tiny peppers, and the Czech Black, a mild sweet pepper, produced nothing at all. So we'll definitely be planting Carmen next year, but we'll almost certainly drop all the others in favor of new varieties.
• Scallions: I don't have good data on these, since we picked them sort of one or two at a time. Brian says we got a "steady one-to-three-months' supply," so I guess there's no need to plant either less or more next year.
• Snap Peas: We got about three pounds total, which isn't too bad. I'd still like it better if we could start harvesting these earlier than the end of May, though. I keep planting them a little earlier every year, but to get any peas in April we'd have to plant them in February, which is probably pushing it too far. Still, this Cascadia variety is the best producer we've had to date, so we'll probably stick with it.
• Squash: We got six squash off our Waltham plants this year, but only two off the Ponca Baby vines. I'm inclined to think we should just go with all Walthams next year if we want to maximize our production. The two varieties taste equally good, so why shortchange ourselves? (Matter of fact, it looks like Fedco doesn't even sell the Ponca Baby seeds anymore. But there's a new variety called "Little Dipper" that allegedly produces "a ton of uniform tan 2-3 lb fruits," and is disease-resistant to boot. So maybe we should give that one a try.)
• Tomatoes: Another disappointment here. The Pineapple variety, which proved so amazingly productive and tasty last year, gave us only one tomato all season. We can't figure out what went wrong. I guess we'll try it again next year in the hope that it was just a fluke of the weather, but we certainly won't count on it for high yield. The Black Prince was also a bit of a flop, yielding only seven medium-ish tomatoes. On the plus side, the Heinz OG produced plentifully, even if the fruits were a bit on the small side, and the Honeydrop cherry tomatoes proved just as prolific—though not quite as tasty—as the Sun Gold, and much less prone to splitting in wet weather. So next year we might go for a mix of Sun Gold and Honeydrop for cherry tomatoes, while keeping the Heinz OG and Pineapple, and maybe trying one new variety to fill in the gaps.
• Zucchini: We kept pretty well on top of our zucchini production this year, so only one squash ended up growing to baseball-bat proportions before we caught it. We got an adequate but not extraordinary yield from our two plants: 13 fingerling zucchini, 2 small, 4 medium, and 2 large. We might have had more if one of the two plants hadn't yielded to borers as usual, but our strategy of burying the stems in dirt managed to keep the other one borer-free, which is a better result than any other technique we've tried. So we'll stick with this method unless we can find anything better.

All in all, a mixed year for the garden. So there's definite room for improvement next year, which we will explore via the Fedco catalogue on our trip out to Indianapolis. Happy holidays to all, and best wishes for a good gardening year in 2019.

Recipe of the Month: Vermicelli Stir Fry

Although Brian was raised as a carnivore, he's generally had no problem adjusting to a mostly vegetarian household. But there's one thing that he finds kind of annoying about tofu: It generally comes in packages weighing a pound or more. That's too much for one dinner, at least for just the two of us, so every time he cooks a meal with tofu, he ends up with leftover tofu he needs to use up within a few days.

Last week, he found himself in this situation again, trying to think of a way to turn a leftover half-pound of tofu and some miscellaneous veggies into dinner. His usual go-to recipe for such occasions is stir-fry, but we'd already had it recently and I wasn't that enthusiastic when he proposed making it again. So he decided to try something a little more interesting by tossing in some rice noodles with the veggies to make a variant of Pad Thai.

However, when he went looking for the rice noodles, he discovered we had an unopened package of something called "Vermicelli Hot Pot" noodles tucked in the back of the cupboard. We'd bought these noodles, which are made chiefly from peas, ages ago and never got around to using them. So, rather than use up our one remaining dinner's worth of rice noodles, he decided to try putting some of these mystery noodles to good use.

There were no instructions on the package for how to cook the noodles, so he just measured out an amount that looked about right—roughly two thirds of the package—and boiled them until they seemed reasonably tender, about five minutes. Then he drained them and added them to the wok with all the other ingredients he'd already stir-fried according to his usual protocol: a half-pound of broccoli florets, two grated carrots, four or five chopped scallions, and the half-pound of fried tofu cubes that had started the whole thing. Then he seasoned it with soy sauce, sesame oil, and some toasted sesame seeds, and called it dinner.

For such a seat-of-the-pants recipe, this actually worked remarkably well. The "Hot Pot" noodles turned out to have a light, slightly chewy texture, less starchy than rice or wheat noodles, which definitely made a more interesting contrast with the veggies than the white rice we usually serve with stir-fry. Since I've never had this type of noodle before, I couldn't say whether their age had affected their texture at all, but it certainly wasn't a problem. Altogether, it was interesting enough and tasty enough that I went back for seconds—something I seldom do with stir-fry—and was quite happy to lunch off the leftovers the next day.

This dish seems pretty healthy, too. The main ingredients are fresh veggies, tofu, and the noodles, which contain only 99 calories per cup, about half as much as regular pasta or rice noodles. That makes this an even lighter meal than fried rice or even our usual stir-fry/rice combo. And since the noodles contain nothing but peas, sulfur dioxide, and corn starch, this meal is suitable for gluten-free diets as well.

All in all, this was a healthy, satisfying, economical meal that I'd be quite happy to make again. In fact, it seems close to certain that we will, since we've still got about a third of the packet of vermicelli to use up. But even when that's gone, I would consider going back to the H-Mart for more,  maybe even on a regular basis, so we can have this dish on tap as an alternative to our usual stir-fry. After all, the whole point of this Veggie of the Month experiment, back when I started it in 2013, was to make fruits and vegetables a bigger part of my diet, so any recipe that turns veggies into an appetizing meal is one that definitely deserves a place in the regular rotation.

Money Crashers: Free & Cheap College Classes for Seniors

I've often thought that my college years were the best time of my life. Don't get me wrong, there are things about my life now that I love and wouldn't want to give up, including my husband, my house, my cats, and this blog. But there were two great things about college that I've never had at any other time in my life. First, I was living in the same place with all my friends, and we all had pretty much the same schedule, so we could hang out together any time—there was none of this calling and e-mailing back and forth just to find a night we're all free to play games. And second, what we called work back in college was studying—reading books, writing papers, learning interesting things. In other words, the kind of thing I have to make a special effort now to make room for in my schedule alongside all my actual work, the kind I get paid for.

When I've thought about how I'd like to spend my retirement, I often think that what I'd really like to do would be to go back to college, or at least someplace like it, where I could live with all my friends and take classes for my own enjoyment. I'm still not sure if there's a way to manage the first part of that, but I've discovered that the second part—taking classes—is not only possible, but could actually be free if I play my cards right.

It turns out, there's at least one college in every state in the country that allows senior citizens to take classes for free, or for a steeply discounted cost—usually just to audit, but sometimes actually for credit. Most schools have rules establishing that these non-paying seniors can only take classes that aren't full, so they aren't taking space away from full-paying students, but that still leaves lots of fun little obscure classes to choose from.

On top of this, there are "lifelong learning programs" at lots of colleges that are specifically for seniors. And there are even whole retirement communities located on or near college campuses, so the residents can hang out and take part in college activities—sometimes including classes.

I've rounded up all the free and discounted college options for senior citizens that I could find in my latest Money Crashers piece: Free & Cheap College Classes for Senior Citizens (By State & University). I realize, of course, that a lot of these programs will probably have changed by the time I'm ready to retire—but it's still something to look forward to. And for any readers who have reached retirement age already, it could be something to check out right now.

Know when to fix 'em, know when to nix 'em

One of the most basic problems of the ecofrugal life is that nothing lasts forever. No matter how much effort you make to choose things that will last—clothing, shoes, products for your home—they'll still wear out eventually. At some point, you always find yourself facing the same old dilemma: Can I make this last a little bit longer, or is it time to give in and replace it?

Unfortunately, there's no simple rule to answer that question. There are a few general principles that can help you decide, but mostly, you have to tackle the problem on a case-by-case basis. Just in this past week, I've faced this same question three times, and I came up with three different answers: one yes, one no, and one maybe.

Case #1: The worn-out trousers

About two years ago, I reported with pride on how I'd managed to take in the oversized waist on a new pair of pants with a piece of elastic. That repair has held up reasonably well, but unfortunately, the rest of the pants didn't. Within a year, they fell victim to the same ailment that affects all my pants eventually: severe wear in the thigh area, which is a lot harder to patch than a rip at the knee. I attempted to patch them with some grey fabric, and this kept them going for a while, but after another year, the patch itself had developed holes.

At this point, any normal person would have given up on the pants, but I just hated to let go of them right at the beginning of winter when they're the warmest pair I own. So I decided to take one more crack at fixing them by removing the old patches and sewing on new ones. This time I went with black fabric from a pair of fleece-lined leggings, putting the soft and comfy side facing in and the smooth side facing out. I hoped this new patch would be both more durable and less noticeable than the original one. 
I used the same method as before, cutting out two large squares that reached all the way from the crotch seam to the spot where the holes were. This allowed me to stitch them down against the existing seam on two sides, making the seams more secure and a little less noticeable. Then I just whip-stitched them into place around the other two sides. I also went around the edges of the hole on the other side and stitched them down against the patch, so they wouldn't flop around.

Well, I can't say yet how durable this fix will be, but I can say it already looks a lot less obtrusive than the previous set of patches. When I tried them on and showed the patched area to Brian, he said he could barely see it; the only reason he could even tell it was there was because I told him. So I have good reason to hope this repair will give me at least one more winter's worth of wear out of these cozy flannel pants before I have to discard them.


Case #2: The snapped-off toilet brush

You may recall how disappointed I was last year to discover that IKEA had stopped carrying refills for our old toilet brush. This was particularly irksome, because the money-saving and waste-preventing refills were the whole reason we'd bought this fancy toilet brush holder in the first place. We tried to tweak one of IKEA's new replacement heads to fit the handle, but it was too wobbly and eventually snapped off at a the handle joint.

However, since we had a second one of the replacement heads on hand, Brian decided to take another crack at fixing it. He inserted the new head into the handle, then reinforced it with some Sugru polymer adhesive to keep it from wobbling. We expected this to be a short-term fix, but to our surprise, the repaired brush actually held together pretty well, and we actually thought we might be able to make it work at least until the head wore out.

Unfortunately, this week we discovered the limits of this hack. After performing faithfully for about a year, this new brush finally snapped off right at the handle, just like its predecessor. And since we're all out of refills, there's no way to repair it again.

So at this point, our choices are: (1) Go back to IKEA, buy some more of these not-very-suitable refills, and attempt to MacGyver them into place yet again; (2) Go back to IKEA and buy one of their new toilet brush holders, which will work with the new refills, but won't work nearly as well with our bathroom; or (3) Just give up and buy a cheap disposable brush. Of these, I guess option 2 is probably the most likely to work, but I'm not exactly happy about it.

Case #3: The not-so-waterproof boots

About two years ago, I declared with great triumph that I'd finally found the perfect pair of winter boots: a good fit, leather-free, decent-looking, comfortable, warm, and dry. They were a bit expensive at $80, but I figured that was a good deal for a pair of boots that should "see me through the next several winters."

Fast-forward to the start of this winter, and I've discovered that these boots no longer keep out water the way they used to. A week or so ago I wore them outside on a rainy day, and although I did my best to avoid the deepest puddles, by the time I got home both boots were soaked right through—and it took several days for them to dry out fully.

At this point, I could have just dropped another $80 on a new pair, but it hardly seemed worth it if they were only going to last me through two winters. And it was frustrating having to toss them when they were still in basically good condition, with the uppers still intact and even a decent amount of tread left on the soles. As far as I could tell, the part that was letting in the water was the joint between the upper and the molded sole, and it seemed like there ought to be some way to patch that.

So I did a little hunting online and found this page that suggested two ways to deal with this kind of leak in a winter boot: either a urethane sealer or a natural wax-based product called Sno-Seal. The Sno-Seal seemed less hazardous to work with, and we actually happened to have an old tube of it on hand, but it also appeared to be designed specifically for leather boots; a few sites said that it could actually damage a a nylon boot like this one.

The product recommended most often for synthetic boots was called Aquaseal SR, so we headed out in search of a tube. We eventually managed to locate a similar product, Aquaseal FD, at Dick's Sporting Goods, and I headed home to try it out. I cleaned the boots carefully and applied the stuff kind of like caulk, squeezing out a bead along the seam and pressing it in with a gloved finger. So far I've done the insides of both boots; they'll need about 24 hours to cure, and then I'll do the same along the outsides.

So it's too early yet to say how well this fix will work. However, it only cost $8 to try it, and if it enables me to get even one more winter's worth of wear out of these boots, that will be enough to bring their cost down from $40 a year to less than $30. Plus, it will save me from having to go back to the drawing board looking for that elusive pair of truly durable winter boots that will actually fit both my feet and my lifestyle.

Our plumbing comedy of errors

Last October, I mentioned that we'd been without water at home for a couple of days, and promised to tell you later about how it came about. So, as promised, here's the whole long, strange story. I referred to it in my earlier post as a "bizarre string of circumstances," but the phrase my husband used in relating the story to his parents was "cascading clusterfuck"—and after hearing the story, his mom, though normally disapproving of such language, had to admit it was an apt description. However, as you'll see at the end, even this perfect storm proved to have a silver lining.

First, a little background: Earlier this year, one of my survey panels invited me to take part in a home product test. The item to be tested was a little device called a Leakbot, which is already in use in Europe and is now being tested for the U.S. market. You clip this gadget onto your home's main water intake pipe, directly above the main shutoff valve, and it can supposedly tell—presumably by detecting changes in water flow through the pipe—when you've got an undetected leak somewhere in your home's plumbing system. It then alerts you through an app and helps you set up an appointment with a plumber.

Anyway, the company offered me a $100 gift card if I would install one of these devices in my home, download the app, and use it for a full year. I figured there was no real downside to this; it wouldn't cost anything, and there was always the chance it might save us some money by catching a leak early on. What did we have to lose?

All went fine for the first month. Then, on a Monday in October, I got a call from Leakbot saying the device had detected a leak in my home. I thought this was odd, since not only had I seen nothing, I hadn't received any alert through the Leakbot app. Just to make sure, I checked the app, and it said our system seemed to be working normally. The phone rep seemed puzzled, but suggested sending out a plumber to check it out just in case. Since I work from home, this was no problem for me, so I agreed to meet with a plumber on Wednesday.

The first thing that went wrong was that the plumber ended up having to reschedule the appointment for Friday—a delay that, for reasons you'll soon see, proved to be significant. So on Friday morning, shortly after Brian (who had taken the day off from work) and I had finished breakfast, two guys showed up on our doorstep and headed down to the utility room to check the system. To do this, the first thing they had to do was shut off the main water valve to the house. And within five minutes, they were back upstairs saying, "We've got some bad news."

The shutoff valve for our plumbing was an old-school compression valve, a type that's particularly likely to break when it gets old—and ours apparently had never been replaced since the house was built in 1971. Knowing this, the plumber did his best to turn it as slowly and gently as possible, but to no avail; it had broken, and the valve was now stuck in the closed position. In short, we no longer had water to the house.

The plumber immediately admitted that, no matter how old and crappy the valve was, fixing it was his responsibility, since he was the last person to touch it. But there was one problem: Since it was the main shutoff valve for the whole house, in order to replace it, he'd need to shut off the water supply to the house at the curb box, which taps into the town water main. And while plumbers normally carry "keys" with them to turn these curb boxes off and on, the curb box used in our town was an unusual type that he didn't have a key for. So we'd have to call the water department to come and shut it off before he could do the repair.

It took a little bit of research to find the number for the water department, and once I managed to get through, they informed me that all their crews were currently out and they'd have to get back to me. I asked if they thought someone would be able to come shut off the water before the office closed at 3pm, since otherwise we'd be without water for the whole weekend, and they could only say, "Well, I hope so." So the plumbers, who had just been sitting around up to this point, decided to take off and attend to another job, while Brian and I had to sit around the house waiting for a call.

Eventually, someone showed up, armed with the appropriate key to turn off the water—but when he tried to put the key into the box, he found he couldn't reach the valve. Due to some sort of settling or shifting, the curb box had actually changed position, leaving the shaft between the shutoff valve and the opening bent and filled with dirt. So there was no way the "key"—basically a long, straight metal pole with a connector on one end—could reach the valve. The guy from the water department informed us we'd have to have the entire box dug out and a new access put in, a job that would probably cost between $2,000 and $3,000—which we'd have to pay out of our own pockets, since the curb box was technically on our property and didn't belong to the borough. So now we were facing a whole weekend without water, plus a repair that would cost between two and three grand. All on account of a leak that, I will stress once again, we had no evidence actually existed.

Well, the plumbers, who had returned from their other job by this point, said their company could take care of the repair for us, but they'd have to send out a separate crew with the right equipment for the job. So we brought up some bottles of water from the basement and settled in for a weekend without running water. Fortunately, the company called us up that evening and said Leakbot had offered to pick up the cost of our new curb box—probably because they realized it would be really bad P.R. if we went around complaining that our Leakbot had cost us $3,000 for repairs because it sent out a plumber to fix a leak that wasn't there. So the good news was, we now knew we weren't on the hook for the expensive repair; the bad news was, we still had no water until it got done. (Leakbot actually offered to pay for the cost of putting us up in a hotel until we could get the curb box replaced, but we declined, figuring we'd be more comfortable at home with no running water than in a hotel with it.)

The repair crew showed up the next day. They didn't bother with any such niceties as ringing the bell or talking to us, so we had only the vaguest idea what was going on out there, but by the afternoon, they'd gone away and left behind a five-by-four-foot patch of gravel where part of our sidewalk had once been. By this, we assumed that we now had a usable curb box. Unfortunately, this got us no closer to having running water in the house, because we still had to wait until Monday for the plumber to come back.

So, first thing Monday morning, I called back the plumbing company to ask when I should expect them. The secretary seemed surprised by the question and said, "You're all done." I had to explain to her that, no, the part of the job that involved heavy digging equipment was done, but we still needed to get the valve replaced before we'd have any water. So she checked the schedules and said, okay,  she'd send someone out on Tuesday. This, in case you're counting, meant a total of four days without water.

Tuesday the plumber showed up. I once again had to call the borough to get them to turn off the water at the curb, which involved making several rounds of back-and-forth calls to them and the plumber to determine that no, they really didn't have the key for the curb box. But eventually we got the water turned off and the plumber installed a new valve. In fact, just for good measure, he installed two—one above the water meter and one below it, which is the setup most homes have. (He explained that most likely, this was the reason our Leakbot had given us a false positive in the first place: the instructions said to clip it to the main water pipe "right above the valve," but in most houses that would mean the valve above the water meter, and I'd installed it below the water meter, since that was the location of the only valve we had. Which means, of course, that if the instructions had simply told me to put it above the water meter, we could have avoided this whole mess.)

Anyway, once the new valve was in place, I had to call the water department yet again to get the water turned back on. The guy from the water department grumbled about the fact that when they'd replaced the box, they hadn't also eliminated the upright piece of pipe that the valve was mounted on, thereby making it unstable. Apparently he'd tried to explain to Brian, the first time he came out, why this was a problem, but between his limited English, Brian's limited plumbing knowledge, and our general frazzled state, it hadn't sunk in, so we didn't think to go out and give the plumbing crew any instructions about it. In any case, it was too late now.

Fortunately, he managed to get the water turned back on without incident, and when I turned on the taps in the house—hallelujah!—water actually came out of them. Admittedly, it came out in a rather spurty fashion due to all the trapped air that had settled in the pipes, but it was a lot better than the barely discernible trickle we'd had before.

When Brian came home, I told him that the problem was now resolved. He went downstairs to take a look at the new valve the plumber had installed, purely out of curiosity, and then came back up saying, "You're not going to like this." Apparently, the new valve—the brand-new valve that we'd gone through all this hassle to get—had a slow leak. It was barely noticeable, just a drop every couple of minutes, but it was definitely there. So after spending the past four days with no water over a leak we didn't actually have, we now had one.

So, the next day, the plumber—who was surely sick of the sight of us by now—came back to install another new valve. This time, just to make absolutely sure there would be no problems, he installed a different type of valve, one he swore couldn't possibly leak. After one more round of calls to the water department to get the water turned off and back on, we finally had a system that was working as it should.

Unfortunately, we also had a torn-up sidewalk that needed to be repaired. It took only a few minutes of research to determine that this wasn't a job we could reasonably do ourselves, so I had to spend much of the next week trying to reach cement companies to get quotes on a repair, and they were all a lot higher than I expected. We eventually ended up paying $350 out of our own pockets to fix the sidewalk...which we'd had to tear up to replace the curb box...which we'd had to replace because of the broken plumbing valve...which broke because a plumber came out to fix a leak that, I will note yet again, didn't exist. (There was also an expense of about $15 to replace the float valve in our upstairs toilet, which had given up the ghost after four days of having buckets of water dumped on top of it every time we needed to flush. But it was old and touchy anyway, so that expense didn't bother me.)

So, even though the problem is now resolved, it sounds like we have a good reason to be ticked off about the whole situation, wouldn't you say? Except, as it turns out, though, there's a coda to this story that shows how the whole disaster was kind of a blessing in disguise.

You see, the weekend after this whole plumbing debacle, Brian was working at the utility sink in our basement, and when he tried to shut it off, he couldn't. There was a slow but persistent drip that stayed no matter how much he tightened the tap.

Well, that's a simple enough problem to fix, right? All you need to do is shut off the water under the sink, take apart the faucet, and replace the washer. Except when Brian checked below the sink, he found there was no shutoff; the hot and cold water lines were both plumbed directly into the wall. This sent him into a panic, because working on it would require him to shut off the water to the whole house, and he was afraid of setting off yet another chain of catastrophes. He was so freaked out that he declared he didn't want to touch the job; I should just hire a plumber.

However, I wasn't prepared to do this without at least looking into the problem first to see how hard it was likely to be to fix it ourselves. A quick search online suggested that, as I'd thought, it was a very simple job; I told Brian I saw no reason I couldn't handle it myself, with no plumbing experience whatsoever, and he certainly should be able to. If he was really that worried about it, I was willing to call a plumber just to set his mind at ease, but only if he really thought it was necessary.

After hearing this, Brian decided he'd be willing to at least give the job a try. He popped by the Home Depot and picked up an assortment of washers and other small parts, figuring that if one of them proved to be the right size, that would save us the trouble of making a hardware run in the middle of the job (and if none of them was, we could always return the set). As it turned out, one of them was a perfect fit, and the whole repair took us probably 15 minutes, from the time we turned off our spanking new main water shutoff valve to the time we turned it back on.

But here's the beautiful irony: If Brian had discovered this leak two weeks earlier and tried to fix it then, we would have been the ones to break the main water shutoff valve. We would still have gone through the entire series of problems with the valve and the curb box and the four days without water, but with one crucial difference: We would have had to pay for the new valve, as well as the new curb box, out of our own pockets, to the tune of around three grand. But as it was, we got both jobs done for free and only needed to pay $350 for the sidewalk repair. So ironically, by giving us a false alarm and setting off a whole chain of unnecessary repairs, Leakbot actually ended up saving us quite a lot of money.

Of course, when the repair crew came to fix the sidewalk, they also pointed out some previously unnoticed, but definitely significant, problems with our roof. So it looks like our home-repair troubles are not over yet. But replacing the roof is an unrelated problem, one that I'll no doubt cover in a future post.

Coupon surprises (or, how to make sure you actually make money with a moneymaker coupon)

Brian and I aren't regular couponers. We don't subscribe to a daily newspaper, so our only sources of coupons are the free "SmartSource" packets that come with our weekly grocery fliers and the load-to-card offers I get by e-mail from Stop&Shop, and most of these offers are for products we really have no use for. So it's fairly unusual for us to use any coupons at all on a shopping trip, and still more rare for us to score the kind of shopping coup that extreme couponers like to brag about, when the stars align and you can combine sales, coupons, and rebates to walk out with a whole cart full of groceries for five bucks.

Instead, Brian and I are what you might call couponers of opportunity. We don't use coupons regularly, but when a special deal falls into our laps, we don't hesitate to snap it up. The upside of this is, because we're not used to getting this sort of deal regularly, it always seems that much more magical when it happens. The downside is, since we're not in the habit of scoring these magical deals, we don't always know how to turn them to the best possible advantage.

To see what I mean, consider two recent trips Brian and I made to Stop&Shop. The first time, we went there to take advantage of a fantastic sale on brownie mix (which we use regularly to bake for the Minstrel concert series): $1 per box, with a $5 discount when you buy 10 boxes. While we were there, we decided to also cash in a coupon I had for a free box of Ronzoni "Thick and Hearty" pasta. And while we were picking this up, we noticed that Ronzoni was on sale for 69 cents a box, so we decided to grab a second box. Loading this all onto the checkout counter, we mentally calculating that our total bill should come to $5.69; $5 for all the brownie mix and $.69 for the one box of pasta that wasn't free. But to our surprise, the bill was actually just $5.13. What was going on?

After puzzling over the various prices and discount notations on the bill, I finally figured it out; the pasta was on sale for $.69 a box, so the two boxes we bought rang up at $1.38. But then, since we had a coupon entitling us to one free box, the register deducted the full price of the Ronzoni Thick and Hearty: $1.25. So this deal turned out to be what couponistas call a "moneymaker": the amount we got back on our $.69 box of pasta was more than we'd actually spent.

Well, needless to say, we were tickled pink with this deal. So the next time I got an offer for a freebie—this time, a free carton of walnut milk—we hastened to the store to snatch it up. While we were there, Brian debated also buying a pound of dry chick peas, but the price—$1.69—seemed a little high to him, so he decided to wait for a sale. We figured we'd just ring up our one item for free and walk out without paying anything.

However, when we got to the checkout, it proved to be not quite so simple. The checker was mystified to see that according to the machine, with our discount, the store actually owed us $1. She ended up having to call over her supervisor, who explained that we'd run up against another of those moneymaker deals: The walnut milk we had a freebie coupon for was currently on sale for $2.99, but the register was trying to deduct the regular price of $3.99.

The supervisor punched in some sort of code, and we finally managed to walk out of the store, plus one carton of walnut milk and minus no money. However, rather than being pleased with this bargain, Brian was kind of annoyed that he hadn't picked up that $1.69 bag of chick peas. If he had, we could have used up our extra $1 in store credit on that, rather than letting it go to waste, and paid only $.69 for the chick peas—a lower price than we're ever likely to find on sale. Plus, would it have made the checkout process a lot less complicated.

I guess the moral of this story is that in future, whenever we cash in one of these freebie coupons, we should always check the current price of the item. If it's on sale, we can guess that our coupon is likely to be a moneymaker and plan out the rest of our purchases to make sure we have something to spend that extra money on. And if that extra item happens to be on sale itself—like, say, a 50-cent box of brownie mix—so much the better.

Plant-based milk experiments: The conclusion

After about a month since my last post on our attempts to become a milk-free household, I figured it was time for an update. And I'll go ahead and lead with the fact that we seem at last to have found a (mostly) satisfactory solution.

The Wholesome Pantry coconut milk from Shop Rite, which I tried right after the Aldi almond milk, was not that solution. I liked it quite well to drink by itself, but it had a very pronounced coconut flavor—much stronger than the homemade coconut milk we tried—which wasn't ideal for all applications. The coconut flavor was reasonably compatible with breakfast cocoa, but it tasted a little off in an egg cream, and it would never work in, say, mushroom-barley soup.

So, on our next visit to Trader Joe's, I decided to check out their selections, hoping for something like oat or flax milk to try next. However, their only choices were soy, almond, and coconut (all available in sweetened and unsweetened, vanilla or plain). But the thought crossed my mind that maybe it would be worth trying the almond milk, even though I hadn't liked Aldi's. I figured there had to be some reason this particular "schmilk" was so popular, so maybe the off taste I'd detected in the Aldi milk was just a peculiarity of that particular brand.

Sure enough, the TJ's almond milk tasted much better than Aldi's. Sweet, creamy, and fairly neutral in its flavor, with little to no almond taste, it worked fine in every application we tried: straight up, on cereal, in cocoa, and in egg creams. Brian also tried using some to make his favorite chocolate pudding and found it actually worked better than the skim milk we've been using, giving it a lighter, silkier texture that melted in the mouth. It's a little more expensive than the Aldi almond milk, at $2.69 per half gallon, and the nearest Trader Joe's store isn't quite as close to us as the nearest Aldi, but then again, we pass right by it our regular route to Princeton on Thursdays, so it should be easy to work it into our routine.

However, finding one alternative we liked didn't stop us from trying a couple of others when the opportunity presented itself. For example, last weekend we happened to be low on almond milk at around the same time we were making a run to Shop Rite, so rather than go out of our way to hit the Trader Joe's as well, we decided to pick up a carton of Wholesome Pantry almond milk and see how we liked that. It turned out to have a mild, sweet flavor with a more noticeable almond taste than the TJ's brand, but not enough to make it incompatible with chocolate. So we now have that available as a backup option (that's only a tiny bit pricier) for any time we can't easily make it to Trader Joe's.

Then yesterday, Stop & Shop sent me a coupon for a free half-gallon of Mariani walnut milk, so we gave that a try as well. The only variety they had at our local store was plain and unsweetened, which tasted noticeably different from the almond milks, with no sweetness whatsoever and just the faintest hint of walnut flavor. However, it was pretty neutral-tasting, and we thought it would work fine for both sweet and savory dishes, as long as we adjusted the amount of sugar to compensate. We did discover one odd thing about it, though; when Brian used some in a bread pudding, it took much longer to bake than usual and still never got completely firm. This made us wonder if maybe it was some special property of cow's milk that gave bread pudding its texture, and we might run into the same problem if we made it with almond milk. However, when I checked bread pudding recipes online, I found several that used almond milk, soy milk, or even plain water, so clearly it's not impossible to make a bread pudding that's dairy-free; we'll just have to experiment a bit more.

I should also mention that, the last time we were at Aldi, we decided to grab one more carton of their almond milk just to make 100 percent sure it wouldn't work for us. I thought it was possible that I'd just happened to get a bad batch the first time I tried it, and Brian thought maybe now that my palate had adjusted to almond milk, the Aldi stuff wouldn't taste so odd. But the second carton merely confirmed our results; when we tasted it side-by-side with the Trader Joe's brand, we could both detect a faint but distinct difference. So, while it would have been nice to go with the cheapest almond milk, we're willing to pay an extra 80 cents a carton for the quality we like.

Or perhaps, to be more accurate, I should say the quality I like. Because Brian, it turns out, has found a way to manage his morning breakfast cereal without using any milk—or any kind of packaged "schmilk"—at all.

Now, Brian grew up drinking 2 percent milk, and that's what he used on his cereal before moving in with me. However, he found that he was able to adapt to using skim milk—even powdered milk, when we were using that—without too much difficulty, even though he found the flavor vastly different for drinking. So he reasoned that for his cereal, flavor wasn't a big concern; all he really needed to do was moisten it. So, as an experiment, he decided to try it with plain water instead of milk. This, he found, had a slightly harsh flavor, so he tried "softening" it by adding a bit of salt and sugar. He used about 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1 tablespoon of sugar to a quart of water, mixing it up in one of our milk bottles and storing it in the fridge.

When he tried this softened water on his cereal, it actually tasted fine, but it looked a little odd. He was used to having a white liquid in the bowl, and the clear liquid was off-putting. So he hit on the idea of taking the walnuts that he normally crumbles onto his morning cereal—about three tablespoons' worth—and soaking them overnight in a little over a cup of the softened water, then grinding up the mixture in the Magic Bullet in the morning. Then he dumps the contents, solids and liquids together, onto his cereal. So, in effect, he's making a homemade walnut milk, except the walnuts aren't costing him anything extra, since he was using them on the cereal anyway. Thus, the only extra expense is the sugar and salt he's adding to the water. It does mean a little bit of extra prep time in the morning, but then again, it saves him the effort of crushing up the walnuts by hand, so it comes out about even.

In conclusion, it looks like we have both managed to find acceptable alternatives to milk for use at home. This does not mean we'll be giving up milk completely; I have no plans to become one of those annoying people who holds up the line at the coffee shop asking what kinds of milk alternatives they have, nor do we want to put friends and family to the trouble of getting special schmilk for us when we come to visit. We're really trying to avoid the stereotype of the obnoxious vegan by practicing our carbon-light diet in a way that doesn't inconvenience anyone else. We're not trying to achieve total ideological purity here, just to shrink our carbon footprint as much as we can reasonably manage.

So, having successfully solved the milk problem, our next challenge is going to be cheese—and this, I suspect, is going to be a lot tougher. After all, making an acceptable milk alternative really isn't that hard; as I noted when I first started experimenting with schmilks back in August, almond milk has been around for centuries. But these plant milks simply don't curdle like cheese. Making a vegan substitute for Parmesan isn't too hard, since it's the flavor and not the texture you need; I've seen lots of recipes for homemade versions made from nutritional yeast with ground nuts, bread crumbs, or straight out of the bottle, all of which would probably serve the purpose. But for something like cheddar or mozzarella, it's much harder to find a substitute. Yes, there are vegan cheese alternatives on the market, but the ones we've seen are either very expensive, not very good, or both. For instance, when we needed to serve a pizza to a vegan friend, we tried Daiya, which is cited on many lists (like  Huffington Post Australia and Spruce Eats) as the best mozzarella alternative out there, and we found it was merely okay. The taste wasn't bad, but it didn't really melt and stretch like the real thing.

Right now, we're thinking our best approach might be just to cut down on cheese, rather than trying to find a substitute for it. We can make recipes that rely on cheese less often, and when we make them, reduce the amount we use. Tonight, for example, Brian whipped up a batch of quesadillas that had maybe a quarter to a third of a pound of shredded Monterey Jack, rather than the half-pound he's been using, spread out across the usual volume of black beans and spinach, and while the texture was certainly different, it wasn't unsatisfying. Since we're not trying to go full vegan, simply cutting back on cheese will allow us to shrink our food footprint while still enjoying a cheesy dish once in a while. And, as a bonus, it will make those cheese-based dishes cheaper, too—which is what ecofrugality is all about.

Recipe of the Month: Brown Butter Butternut Squash Rigatoni

Around the end of October, I finally got around to picking up and going through that month's edition of Savory, the free magazine from Stop & Shop. The last few issues haven't held anything of interest, so my hopes weren't high, but this time I found two recipes that looked worth trying: a mushroom soup and a butternut squash pasta. And since we just happened to have about half a squash in the fridge left over from the pizza we made to celebrate Late Harvest, Brian decided a half recipe of the pasta would be the perfect way to use it up.

Although it sounds fancy, Brown Butter Butternut Squash Rigatoni isn't really hard to make. (Actually, we used penne instead of rigatoni, because that's what we had, but it didn't seem to suffer any from the substitution.) The recipe calls for pre-cut chunks of butternut squash, but using whole, fresh butternut squash isn't that much more work, especially since you have to cut the big chunks into smaller chunks anyway. Nearly much any other kind of winter squash would be a big hassle to peel, but butternut is actually pretty easy, and in this particular case, our squash was already peeled and sliced from the earlier recipe. So it was just a matter of cutting it into cubes and sautéing it in a pan with olive oil and garlic. The most intimidating-sounding part of the recipe, making the brown butter, turned out to be quite simple: just add the butter to the pan with the squash for the last several minutes of cooking. Once everything is tender, pull it off the heat, toss it with the pasta, and top it with salt, pepper and Parmesan.

But although the dish wasn't at all complicated, it definitely wasn't lacking in the flavor department. I'd had all the ingredients in this dish before—pasta, butternut squash, garlic, butter, fresh sage—but putting them all together in this way gave it some kind of indefinable extra flavor that didn't seem to come from any of them. I'd never had anything made with brown butter before, and I'm not sure whether that was what made the taste so subtle and complex, but it definitely seemed to be much more than the sum of the parts.

The other really nice thing about this recipe is that it doesn't call for any ingredients we don't normally have on hand. Pasta, olive oil, garlic, butter, and grated Parmesan are all staples in our house, and fresh sage grows right outside the door year-round (as long as it's not buried under a foot of snow). So this will make a nice, hassle-free addition to our regular repertoire of butternut squash recipes (butternut squash lasagna, pizza, and soufflé). And since it's easy to scale the recipe, we can rely on it any time we need to use up some extra butternut left over from any of those other dishes. It's definitely a keeper.

Money Crashers: How Much Does Your Job Really Pay?

My latest Money Crashers article was inspired largely by two pieces out of Amy Dacyczyn's Complete Tightwad Gazette (all hail the Frugal Zealot!). In the first piece, called "The Time and Money Chart," she talks about how to figure out which money-saving tasks are most worth the effort, based on how much money they save you (and how much satisfaction they provide in other ways) for each hour you spend on them. For instance, she calculates that making two homemade pizzas takes 20 minutes and costs about $2, while having two similar pizzas delivered would cost about $18 (remember, this was nearly 30 years ago). That's a savings of $16 for 20 minutes of work, or $48 per hour, making this a task that's definitely worth the time. Canning pears, by contrast, is a labor-intensive task that saves only $1 per hour of work compared to buying canned pears at the store.

One of the most interesting items in this chart appears at the bottom, where she claims that going back to work as a graphic designer would yield only $3.33 per hour. She reaches this figure by calculating that, while she could nominally earn $15 per hour, after taxes and expenses for child care, wardrobe, and transportation, her pay would be "whittled down to $5 per hour." Moreover, her nominal 40-hour week would really require 60 hours of effort counting "additional dressing and grooming time, dropping kids at a sitter's, the lost lunch hour, commuting and after-work-crash-from-exhaustion time," bringing the actual hourly wage to a mere $3.33, far below many of the other frugal tasks she does every day.

She makes the same point again in the second article, "Trend Reversal," talking about the "nationwide trend" of women dropping out of the work force to stay home with their kids. She cites a study saying that the "percentage of women under age 30 in the workforce peaked in 1989 at 75 percent" and had fallen by 3 to 4 percent by the early nineties, and speculates that this is partly because many mothers don't find it worth their while financially to work. She points to a Labor Department study showing that "about 80 percent of working mothers' incomes is absorbed by job-related expenses such as child care, clothing, transportation, and meals away from home." She also makes a point of noting that this same strategy could work for stay-at-home dads as well, but she couldn't find any data on whether their numbers were increasing.

Putting these two ideas together, I wrote a piece for Money Crashers called "How Much Does Your Job Really Pay? – Calculating Your Hourly Wage," which replaced an older article called "Quit Your Job to Save Money" (which I thought was a bit of an overstatement). The main point of the new article is that, if you're staying at a job you don't like much because you need the money, it's worth calculating how much you actually make for each hour you devote to the job, and how much you could potentially make doing something else you might like more—whether that's a different job, freelance work, or staying home with kids. For anyone who's ever wished they could afford to quit their job, it's worth a read.

Gardeners' Holidays: Late Harvest

Well, production in the garden is slowing down. The tomatoes have tapered off, although we're still getting an occasional pepper (particularly off our new Carmen plant, which has proved to be tremendously productive). We've harvested four butternut squash so far (three Waltham and one Ponca Baby), and there are four more out there left to pick. We still have lima beans to harvest, though not an impressive amount of them. And since there's been no frost yet, all the herbs in our herb bed are still in good shape. In fact, the plants are so big that I've taken to harvesting them for flower arrangements.

The big surprise, for this time of year, is that we're still getting green beans. Normally, the harvest has completely dried up by this time of year—and indeed, the green bean variety we actually bought (Provider) has stopped producing. But somehow, in amongst the Provider beans in the packet, there must have been one rogue bean of another variety. While the Provider is a bush bean that produces compact, clumpy plants, this mystery bean sent out a long tendril that snaked its way right up the trellis where the snow peas used to be, and spread until it covered half the trellis.

Brian didn't know what to make of it, but he let it be, and about a month later—right as the Provider beans were ending—it suddenly started to produce beans. These looked nothing like the beans we'd been getting off the Provider plant, which were long and round in shape; these were much shorter and flatter, and they cooked up nice and tender. And they just kept coming, all throughout the fall: over two pounds of them so far, from just one plant. The last few Brian picked were a little tougher than the rest, so it looks like these mystery beans may be coming to an end, but that's still a pretty impressive harvest for something we never actually intended to plant.

This bean's production and flavor were so impressive, and having fresh green beans all autumn long was such a treat, that we'd like to plant some more of them next year (on purpose this time). The only difficulty is that, since this bean just kind of showed up in our garden, we're not sure what variety it is. We know it's a pole bean, and it produces purplish blossoms and flat, tender, string-free beans that keep coming well into autumn. Based on an article in The Spruce, we guessed it might be a "Climbing French" bean, and the picture on the Seed Savers site looks right, so our best bet would be to buy a packet of these, plant some along with the Provider beans, and hope for the best. Unfortunately, Fedco doesn't carry them, so we'll have to try to pick them up somewhere else, or else move our entire seed order for the year to another company.


For now, we enjoyed what may be the last of these beans for this year on Halloween night, along with a butternut squash pizza with sage and some apple crisp for dessert. The pizza recipe only uses a little bit of squash, so we've got some left over to try a recipe out of the October edition of Savory, which you'll probably be seeing soon as our Recipe of the Month for November.

The ultimate low-water dishwashing method

Due to a bizarre string of circumstances which, in the words of Michael Flanders, I'll tell you all about some other time, we currently have no water at our house. For the past 46 hours or so, we have been unable to bathe, do laundry, or do anything else that requires a large amount of water, and we'll probably be in the same position for at least 24 hours more.

In the absence of running water, we've had to get a bit creative. My enterprising husband has taken to hauling up buckets of water from our rain barrel to flush the toilet with, and for brushing our teeth, washing our hands, and cleaning dishes, we've been relying on our emergency stores of water from the basement. I brought up two 2-liter bottles yesterday as soon as it became apparent we were going to be without water for a while, and I used up part of one right away for washing my hands. I assumed I'd have to go down and get at least one more after dinner, so Brian would have enough to wash the dishes with.

Instead, to my astonishment, I looked up from my book to discover that he'd already done them all—and not only was the second bottle of water still full, there was still some left in the first. He'd actually washed the entire dinner's worth in less than a liter of water. And all this without even having a dishpan to soak them in.

I was so impressed by this that I insisted on watching him clean the breakfast dishes this morning so I could observe and document his low-water technique. As you can see here, he started out with a good sinkful of dishes: one big plate, one cereal bowl, the two cat dishes from the previous night, a cocoa cup, a juice glass, the filter cone I use for coffee, and a baking pan we'd used to bake a cake for the Minstrel concert the night before.

And here's the amount of water he poured out for himself to start with: about ten ounces. That's it! He ended up needing just a little bit more to finish rinsing that last pan, but as you'll see, it wasn't very much.

As he worked, he explained to me the basic premises of his low-water washing technique. The most important rule, he said, is to make every bit of water you use do as many jobs as possible. So, when you rinse off a dish, don't just let the rinse water run down the drain; make sure it runs off into another dish, where it can start the process of soaking. It's kind of like the way the family in Little House on the Prairie used to bathe on Saturday nights, letting the children bathe first, then Ma, and finally Pa (the largest member of the family, and thus presumably the one with the most dirt on him), all in the same tub of water, because hauling and heating up a fresh tubful for each of them would have been five times as much work. The point is to avoid wasting any amount of water that could still be useful, no matter how small.

He demonstrated this by taking the little bit of water he'd left in the cats' dishes overnight to soak them and using that to moisten the plates. Then he gave each of them a quick once-over with the dish scrubber wand, using the little bit of water he'd just added to work up a lather. If they had any residue clinging to them that the dish wand couldn't easily remove, he used the green scouring pad for a slightly rougher treatment. Up to this point, he'd actually used no additional water beyond the tiny bit that was in the cat dishes.

Once he had everything soaped up, he began using the water in the measuring cup to rinse the dishes. He started with the smallest dishes and worked his way up to the biggest ones, and as he worked, he let the rinse water from each dish run off into a larger one. Here, for instance, he's rinsing one of the cat dishes and emptying the rinse water into his cereal bowl.

And here's a three-fer: he's emptying the water from the juice glass, pouring it out over my cocoa spoon to rinse that, and letting it empty into the baking pan.

When he got to the biggest dish of the lot, the baking pan, he found he didn't have quite enough water left to rinse it. So he poured out just a little bit more from the bottle into the measuring cup—not more than two ounces—to finish the job.

Counting this and the little bit of water that was left over in the cat dishes, he didn't use more than a pint altogether to clean the whole sinkful of dishes.

As Brian pointed out, doing dishes this way does involve a trade-off: while it uses a lot less water, it also takes more time. So it's not necessarily something he would want to do when water is plentiful. But after demonstrating the technique for me, he started to think that maybe, with a bit of practice, he could work some of these water-saving strategies into his normal daily dish-washing without taking too much extra time. So even when our household water is flowing again, we might be able to use less of it. If that helps us stay in the bottom tier of usage on our quarterly water bill, saving us $18 a pop, then I'm all for it.

Money Crashers: How to Prevent Child Identity Theft

While doing research for my article on freezing your credit, I discovered that it's also possible to set up a credit freeze for a child younger than 17. On the face of it, this seems like a puzzling thing to do, since kids that young can't legally borrow money and shouldn't have a credit report in the first place. And it's true, they can't open credit accounts for themselves—but that doesn't stop other people from creating accounts using their information. In fact, the very fact that kids can't create their own credit reports makes them particularly appealing targets for identity thieves, because they can create a fake credit profile with a young child's data and use it for years without getting caught.

This seemed like a big enough deal to deserve an article of its own. So my latest Money Crashers article is all about the problem of identity theft. It covers:

• How child identity theft happens, and how it differs from adult identity theft
• Who commits this crime and why
• Which children are most at risk
• What it can cost the victims and their families
• Warning signs of child identity theft
• Ways to prevent it, including checking and/or freezing your kids' credit reports, protecting their personal information, being aware of risky situations, and talking to your kids about it
• What to do if your child is a victim

This information is vital for anyone who has kids, and useful for anyone who knows anyone who has kids. I'm thinking of passing the article along to my sister and my sibs-in-law, just to give them a heads-up so none of our niblings (did I mention that this is the official gender-neutral plural for nieces and nephews?) ever have to deal with this problem.

How to Prevent & Avoid Child Identity Theft – Protection For Your Kids

Money Crashers: Should You Buy a Starter Home?

When Brian and I bought this house, we knew we were in it for the long haul. We planned to take our time fixing up this house, and the yard, to turn it into the home of our dreams. This was where we would grow our own veggies, plant fruit trees, build a compost bin, set up a rain barrel, bake fresh bread, have friends over for games, and generally build our ecofrugal life together. If it wasn't going to be our "forever home," it was at least going to be home for the foreseeable future.

The ironic thing about that is, I realize that many people, looking at our modest little three-bedroom minimal-traditional, would consider it a "starter home." For them, this would clearly be a transitional house - not your dream house, but the place you buy to live in until you can afford your dream house.

So whose approach makes more sense? Buying a starter home just to get your foot in the door and eventually trade up, or waiting to buy until you're ready to buy a home for keeps?

Well, there's something to be said for both sides. In my latest Money Crashers article, I explore the implications of buying a starter home: what you have to gain, what you're giving up, and what factors to consider before you decide. I hope this will be helpful for anyone who's considering buying a first home, and possibly even for those who have already bought one and are now wondering how long to stay in it.

Should You Buy a Starter Home as a First-Time Home Buyer?

Plant-based milk experiments, phase 3: Aldi's almond milk

The biggest news on the environmental front this month, pretty obviously, was the October 8 IPCC report on climate change. Among other bombshells, it revealed that we're going to have to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, rather than the 2°C many nations have been aiming for, if we want to avoid major ecological disasters around the globe. (The Guardian offers a pretty good summary of what a difference this half-degree could make, including "extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty.") Furthermore, we have only 12 years to hit this target, and it will take "rapid and far-reaching" changes in just about everything: land use, energy, industry, buildings, transportation.

Unfortunately, there's not that much any single person can do to make that happen. A recent Lifehacker story suggests several ways to put pressure on your elected officials and "take action yourself," but the steps it promotes—drive less, vote more, compost—are all things I've already been doing for decades. However, the Guardian's advice on the subject actually pointed toward one clear, concrete step that I could take to do my bit for the atmosphere: cutting down on dairy. In fact, it said cutting back on meat and dairy was "the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet," and pointed to yet another study, this one published in Science last June, to prove it.

After reading the Guardian's coverage of that study, along with a few other articles I found on the topic, I decided it was time to start getting serious about getting off the moo juice. Over the past few months, I'd tried tinkering around with various plant-based milk alternatives, but I just hadn't found one that seemed to tick all the ecofrugal boxes: eco-friendly, not too expensive, and reasonably good for all the uses we currently put milk to. But after seeing the new research on just how big an impact dairy actually has, I decided just about any alternative had to be better than cow's milk; it was just a matter of finding one that could work for me.

So I decided to start with the least expensive non-dairy milk I'd seen so far: Aldi almond milk, at $1.89 per half-gallon. On our last trip to Aldi, I picked up a half-gallon of it, planning to test it in all the applications we normally use cow's milk for: my morning cocoa and afternoon egg cream, Brian's breakfast cereal, and the occasional glass drunk straight. If it performed satisfactorily in all these tests, I figured we could take the plunge and switch over completely. It wouldn't end up costing us too much than dairy milk, and with three different Aldi stores within a few miles of our house, it wouldn't require too big a change in our shopping habits.

Now, in an ideal world, this story would conclude with the news that Aldi's almond milk passed all its tests with flying colors, and we were now one step farther along the path to achieving vegan superpowers. But unfortunately, it didn't go down that way.

The almond milk did fine on some of my tests. In fact, for drinking straight, I'd say I actually liked it a bit better than cow's milk. Brian was also quite satisfied with the way it worked on his breakfast cereal. However, when I used it in my morning cocoa, something about it tasted just a little...off. It was hard to put my finger on, but there was a faint off-taste that clashed ever so slightly with the chocolate. This odd flavor was even more noticeable when I tried it in an egg cream, and on top of that, the fizz seemed to go flat much quicker than it does with regular milk.

So after four unsatisfying days on almond milk, I felt like I was back at the old drawing board once more, searching yet again for that perfect milk alternative that I knew must be out there somewhere.
Seeking inspiration, I tuned in this morning to a Science Versus podcast on plant-based milks, in which pun-loving host Wendy Zukerman posed the question, "Are they udder bull?" (along with as many other puns as she could manage to "milk" the subject for). She spoke to Joseph Poore, one of the authors of the Science study, about these plant-based milks (or as she called them, "schmilks"), and he revealed that, unfortunately, they all come with their share of environmental problems. Almond milk, of course, has its heavy water use; rice milk turns out to be much more carbon-heavy than other nondairy milks, due to the methane produced by rice paddies; and soy and oat milk both use rather a lot of land to produce.

But here's the thing: even with these problems, all these "schmilks" are much, much better than dairy milk. Switching to any of them, Dr. Poore argued, would result in much lower land use, water use, and carbon emissions. The bottom line is, it doesn't really matter which one you pick: they're all so much better than cow's milk that you pretty much can't go wrong. Just figure out which one you like enough to drink it regularly, and go with that.

So instead of obsessing over which is "the best" ecofrugal milk alternative, I'm just going to settle for finding one I can live with. Since I've already rejected the cheapest variety I could find, I'm moving on to the second-cheapest: Shop-Rite store brand coconut milk, which costs $3 per half gallon. That's about twice as much as we currently pay for cow's milk, but looked at in perspective, we're only talking about an extra $6 a week here; that's not going to break us. And besides, with only 12 years to save the planet from climate apocalypse, we don't have time to pussyfoot around.

Money Crashers: 6 Ways Pinching Pennies Can Cost You Dollars

Several of my recent articles for Money Crashers have dealt with fairly weighty topics, like rising interest rates, credit freezes, and the infuriating Obamacare family glitch. So I'm pleased to announce that my latest article to pop up on the site is on the lighter side. Called "6 Ways Pinching Pennies Can Cost You Dollars," it deals with all those situations in which cheaping out can actually end up costing you more in the long run. Here's a sneak peak at what it covers:

• Ill-advised bulk buys (such as six avocados, all at the peak of ripeness, for $5, instead of one for $1.25)
• Cheap products with pricey parts (such as the notorious printer ink cartridges that cost half as much as the printer itself)
• Time-consuming strategies for saving money (such as making your own laundry detergent, which I've never quite seen the point of)

And that's just three of the six topics. Check out the full article to learn about all the different ways pinching pennies can cost you dollars, and leave a comment if you can think of any more I left out.

Recipe of the Month: Quinoa Salad with Lemon, Spinach, and Poppy Seeds

Brian and I don't tend to take vacations, the way most people think of the word. Aside from spending a week or so with his family at Christmas, we only take the odd long weekend here and there to visit friends or go to a Morris dance event. This leaves Brian with a lot of extra vacation days every year that he can't cash in or carry over. So instead, when the year starts drawing to a close and it's apparent he won't need all those vacation days for something unexpected, he starts taking Fridays off, basically giving himself a bunch of long weekends in a row.

This weekend was the first of these, so we took the opportunity to go to our local farmers' market together. Brian usually doesn't get to go to this, since it's open only on Fridays from 11am to 5:30pm; if he took off early enough on a Friday, he could swing by and catch the very tail end of it, but that's not as much fun as heading over in the middle of the day and taking the time to see everything. So we walked down together, browsed the booths, and bought a couple of things we needed—a dozen eggs, some apples—and then tried to figure out if there was anything else we wanted. We already had plenty of butternut squash and green beans out of our own garden, but one fall crop we've never been able to grow properly is spinach, so I suggested picking up a bunch of that. Initially I was thinking of putting it into a pasta dish we make that calls for wilted spinach or arugula, dried cranberries, and almonds, but Brian reminded me that we were out of dried cranberries. Rather than make a special trip to buy more, we decided to get the spinach, take it home, and then browse through Mark Bittman for ideas on what to do with it.

Brian looked up "spinach" in the index and hit on a recipe that looked like it could hardly miss: Quinoa Salad with Lemon, Spinach, and Poppy Seeds. And that title is pretty much the entire ingredient list, aside from a simple lemon vinaigrette dressing (olive oil, lemon, salt, and "plenty of pepper"). What makes this salad interesting is that, unlike most recipes, it actually uses the whole, not just the juice and/or the rind. You peel it like an orange, cut it into little chunks, and toss them with the cooked quinoa, tossed spinach, and dressing. The small bunch of organic spinach we'd shelled out three bucks for at the farmers' market was just enough to make one batch, and we just happened to have all the other ingredients on hand.

As salads go, this one was pretty tasty. The flavors of lemon and spinach play well together, and the juicy lemon chunks, chewy quinoa, and crunchy poppy seeds give it an interesting blend of textures (though those pesky little seeds also have a tendency to stick in your teeth). However, I must admit that even with all that protein-rich quinoa, it wasn't really hearty enough to make a meal of on its own. We ended up supplementing it with some leftover Butternut Squash Pizza with Sage, and the salad plus a slice of that was about the right amount for a satisfying dinner. I imagine this salad would also pair well with any simple protein dish, such as baked chicken or broiled fish. Or maybe you could make a meal out of it just by adding a fairly hearty bread.

So will we be making it again? Well, maybe. The snag is that, as we discovered at the farmers' market, fresh spinach—even in season—can be pretty pricey, and we've never had any luck at growing it ourselves. So although we both liked this salad, we probably didn't like it enough to pony up three bucks for a bunch of spinach just to make it. However, if we happened to buy a fairly big bunch of spinach for another recipe—like the pasta dish, or Spinach with Raisins and Walnuts—and had some left over, a suitably scaled version of this recipe could be a good way to use it up without having to buy any special ingredients.